Skip to content

Writer Quotes by Virginia Woolf

119 Writer quotes by Virginia Woolf

All Writer quotes Virginia Woolf’s page

A book can feel like a secret garden that invites you to explore. Reading offers a deep pleasure that fills the mind with imagination. Some writers start because they can’t find the perfect book they’ve always wanted. They use that longing to create stories that become new places to visit.

Rate this collection: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ No ratings yet

The truer the facts the better the fiction.

Image

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

Image

The way to write well is to live intensely.

Image

literature is the record of our discontent.

Image

It is the duty of the writer to describe.

Image

“Books, she thought, grew of themselves.”

Image

I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.

Image

“She read everything.”

Image

“Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.”

Image

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.

Image

“Oh, yes, dear reader: the essay is alive. There is no reason to despair.”

Image

Writing is still like heaving bricks over a wall.

Image

I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person.

Image

It's the writing, not the being read, that excites me. Joy is in the doing.

Image

I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.

Image

People ask me why I write. I write to find out what I know.

Image

Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.

Image

“Literature had taken possession even of her memories. She was matching him, presumably, with certain characters in the old novels...”

Image

But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.

Image

“Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered”

Image

As an experience, madness is terrific ... and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.

Image

I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity.

Image

The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts,…

Image

I [who] am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement...

Image

“I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the…

Image

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm…

Image

I must try to set aside half an hour in some part of my day, and consecrate it to diary writing. Give…

Image

The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to…

Image

“For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand…

Image

“It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at. And then not to talk. To…

Image

“Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which…

Image

So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat.…

Image

“And somehow or other, the windows being open, and the book held so that it rested upon a background of escallonia hedges…

Image

Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties -- one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so…

Image

The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature.…

Image

“But to continue the story of my professional experiences. I made one pound ten and six by my first review; and I…

Image

To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired…

Image

Let us begin by clearing up the old confusion between theman who loves learning and the man who loves reading, and point…

Image

“The one she needed most kept aloof, for she was, to hear her talk, changing her selves as quickly as she drove…

Image

A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which…

Image

Other authors on Writer

More by Virginia Woolf

Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.

“The train slows and lengthens, as we approach London, the centre, and my heart draws out too, in fear, in exaltation. I am about…

“Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword. On one side all is correct, definite, orderly; the paths…

“Other worshipful objects were content with worship; men, women, God, all let one kneel prostrate; but this form, were it only the shape of…

Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.

“Sometimes he woke with a brain like lead; at others it was as if a thousand wax tapers were alight and people were throwing…

The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life -…

A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age.

Love ought to stop on both sides, don’t you think, simultaneously?’ He spoke without any stress on the words, so as not to wake…

“It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at. And then not to talk. To follow the…

“What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! (...) I think I could happily live here & read forever.”

“what a luxury to be alone once more,”

“...a woman writing thinks back through her mothers.”

“For one's children so often gave one's own perceptions a little thrust forwards.”

“She would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same…